Tag: workflow

Tag: workflow

Make your workflows more efficient by implementing workflow rules.

There are sometimes things that can’t be changed, like breaking the law by going faster or ignoring other rules of the road.

Work-Relay provides mechanisms to selectively restrict change to flows. With the potential for serious missteps in the execution of flows, organizations need the balancing capability to lock down certain steps in their flows, ensuring compliance on the one hand, enabling goal-centric behavior on the other. This provides flexibility while still ensuring control where variations are not permitted.

Many complex systems are based on simple rules. A set of several simple rules leads to complex, intelligent behavior, while a set of complex rules often leads to dumb and primitive behavior. There are many examples of this.

Flocking geese follow a simple set of rules when flying in formation: don’t bump into each other, match up with the speed of the other geese flying by, replace the lead goose when it gets tired, and always remain with the group.

From these few simple rules, a complex and efficient flying pattern emerges.

The point is that workflow rules are used sparingly in Work-Relay compared to what you would find in traditional BPM. There is no attempt to nail down each possible path or every possible exception. This provides the individual participants a large degree of autonomy, while reaching the group’s objective efficiently under many different circumstances.

There are 3 types of workflow rules that can be included:

The trick…is to introduce bits of automation that will fit into the work and do useful things, and then make it possible for people to work with those bits of automation embedded in the systems while leaving them the discretionary space to exercise the kind of judgment they need to exercise to really get the work done.

– Derek Miers – Process Innovation and Corporate Agility (2007)

Start defining your workflow automation steps today!

A step is a unit of work; it identifies an activity or task(s) that needs to be done before the flow can move forward. Steps are explicitly defined and operationally independent units of functionality. Each flow consists of multiple steps, and a single step can be in multiple flows.

Workflow automation steps are a complete unit of work

Workflow automation steps are not executed until its pre-conditions are met, and is not completed until it satisfies the rules for completion.